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Clash of the featherweights
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May 9, 2000 | Sadly (since one of them is almost certainly our next president), they have accurately pinpointed each other's weaknesses. Consider, for example, this country's failed policies toward Cuba and China. Bush and Gore both oppose relaxation of the economic embargo that the United States instituted against the Castro regime four decades ago; they also oppose the resumption of diplomatic ties that were severed at the same time. They offer virtually identical justifications for pursuing this failed policy, which is now under renewed scrutiny due to the Elián González case.
Joe Conason Joe Conason's column appears in Salon News every other Tuesday.
Both candidates also favor an entirely opposite approach to the even more repressive communist regime that rules China. Along with the Clinton administration and its Republican allies in Congress, both candidates now favor granting China "permanent normal trade relations." From time to time, someone asks why China should receive preferential treatment when Cuba remains isolated. The responses from Bush and Gore sound as if they were scripted by the same speechwriter. Asked a week ago to explain why he advocates increasing trade with Beijing while maintaining the embargo on Havana, Gore replied: "We have had some openings [to Cuba] ... We have much more open communications people to people there now. We have more shipments of food and medicine there now. We have seen, in response to this, Castro going in the opposite direction, really cracking down with more repression than before." The People's Republic of China, he continued, is not only "the largest nation in the entire world" but is "moving toward an opening, not as rapidly as we would like to see ... I don't want to idealize it, it's far from what we would like to see. But the direction ... has definitely [been toward] more openness in markets and communication." Answering a similar question last November, Bush said that "trade with China ... will help spread freedom. The difference is ... that capital as it heads into Cuba must go through the hands of the Fidel Castro administration in one form or another, and I don't want to support the totalitarian regime of Fidel Castro." This argument is fully as lame as anything Gore has said on the subject. As Bush's friends on Capitol Hill could tell him, the dominant Chinese commercial organizations are affiliated with the government and specifically with the People's Liberation Army. The Texas governor's knee-jerk attitude is probably encouraged by his chief tutor in foreign policy, a much-admired veteran of the Bush White House named Condoleezza Rice. When a Washington Post reporter inquired about her view of Cuba, the usually thoughtful Rice had nothing intelligent to say. Until Castro is gone, the embargo should remain in place, she insisted, because the Cuban dictator "bet on the wrong horse" and should be duly punished. If that dim remark represents the quality of the lessons Rice is giving Bush, his superficial policy comments should hardly be a surprise.
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